The present invention relates to an apparatus for automatically trimming and cutting images on sheets of paper and other graphic and photographic supports, and in particular images, also with different formats, arranged on said sheets along several rows and columns.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,586,479 to Roy et al. discloses an apparatus for trimming and cutting images of the same format arranged on a sheet of photographic paper along several rows and columns parallel to each other, but not necessarily parallel to the edges of the same sheet. This known apparatus comprises two cutting devices arranged perpendicular to each other upstream and downstream, respectively, of a conveying device which aligns the strips of images coming from the first cutting device before sending them to the second cutting device. However, in this known apparatus the sheet to be cut must be carefully guided, since if it is not conveyed with the edges arranged perfectly parallel to the feed direction, the images can be not precisely cut along their edges. For avoiding this drawback, the patent applications EP 951973 and PCT/IT01/00131 of the same applicant disclose two cutting devices wherein the sheet to be cut can be inserted and/or conveyed with the edge not necessarily parallel to the feed direction, even when the same sheet is very large. However, these known cutting devices can cut the images from the sheet only along one axis, so that a manual intervention is necessary when the images are arranged along several rows and columns.